Grazed from Dynamic Business.  Author: Sharon Shapiro.

Google Apps, which first came on the market in 2006, offers a cloud computing platform devoted entirely to businesses. Google Apps for Business is an ideal cloud network for businesses of all sizes because it guarantees reliability with a 99.9 percent uptime, security with SAS 70 Type II audit, and premier communication and collaboration applications.

All of the features that come standard with Google Apps for Business, like Gmail, Google Documents, and Google Sites, are designed to improve the way your employees communicate with one another and to make working together simpler and more enjoyable. While a simple Google Apps migration to move your business to the Google cloud will provide your employees with these tools, there are steps you can take in order to make sure your business is taking as much advantage of them as possible…

Grazed from SBWire.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Worldwide markets are poised to achieve steady growth as mobile devices become the standard for client computing. Cloud office productivity suites feature systems that are online and intuitive to use. They are part of social networking; they represent personalized use of computing. People can start a project without help from anyone, can ask for help if they need it, and can produce a result, a document, analysis, or presentation. Productivity software is becoming easier to use, increasingly inclusive of media, pictures, and video materials.

Collaboration is a big part of cloud based productivity applications. On the cloud, people can get access to integrated information data sources. People are increasingly bringing their own devices to work. Wireless devices promise to take over everything. People can leverage what they know to communicate to a group. Team collaboration changes everything. As a sales manager builds a power point presentation that is customized to a particular customer, he or she may wish to adapt content used by a different member of the team for a different client. The manager may need the slides to be changed by a third team member who specializes in design. In this manner, cloud connectivity is becoming adopted and proving its usefulness…

Grazed from Federal Computer Week.  Author: John Moore.

Cloud computing has managed to make the world’s already colossal appetite for data storage even more voracious.

Last year, IDC, an IT market research firm, cited public cloud-based service providers, from Amazon Web Services to YouTube, as the most significant drivers of storage consumption in the past three years. The government sector contributes as well: IDC noted that the private clouds of government and research sites compare in scope and complexity to their public cloud counterparts.

The so-called big data problem has surfaced in the past two years to rank among the primary IT challenges. Technologies such as the Apache Hadoop distributed computing framework and NoSQL databases have emerged to take on the challenge of very large — and unwieldy — datasets…

Grazed from IT Business Edge.  Author: Michael Vizard.

As most mobile computing applications are dependent on services in the cloud, it’s only natural that the applications running across these platforms would start to become almost indistinguishable.

That’s exactly the goal that the folks at Appcelerator, providers of the Titanium integrated development environment (IDE) for building mobile computing applications, have in mind with the launch of Appcelerator Cloud Services, which developers using a new release of the Titanium IDE can now use to host run-time instances of their applications…

Grazed from Midsize Insider.  Author: Doug Bonderud.

The IT landscape is currently dominated by a single albeit misunderstood revolutionary force–cloud computing. Experts agree that cloud solutions are the likely future of the market and that the function of IT professionals will be altered at a fundamental level and their role in crucial business decisions increased as cloud technology becomes more robust. But along with the potential for significant games comes the specter of what is known as "cloud sprawl"–unrestrained growth of a public or private cloud without clear direction or control by the company that owns the data. Now, midsized businesses are looking for ways to stay in charge without sacrificing the agility of cloud solutions.

On the Way Up 

According to a recent Techworld article, the number of enterprise and midmarket companies using public cloud infrastructe-as-a-service (IaaS)–to cite just one example of cloud adoption–is on the rise. In a 2011 survey, only 17 percent of respondents said that they were using these services, but that number has now jumped to 27 percent. Twenty-four percent of those asked said they had plans to implement a cloud solution at some point during 2012, but the numbers aren’t all on the upside; while Gartner’s Lydia Leong says, "Public cloud IaaS is rapidly becoming an accepted technology approach to doing business," 28 percent of midsized and enterprise businesses have no plans to head skyward just yet…

Grazed from VentureBeat.  Author: Ciara Byrne.

London’s Notion Capital  just raised a $100m new fund focused on cloud computing and SaaS (software as a service) startups in Europe. The fund is expected to reach $150 million by the time it closes in the next few months.

Investments from Notion’s previous fund included on-demand business services supplier Star and “Skype for invoicing” Tradeshift, which also received seed funding from Paypal. Tradeshift is already valued at $137 million after 2 years in business. A typical investment single investment from the new fund will be in the $1-3 million range, but the fund is prepared to put up to $15 million into a single company over the course of several rounds…

Grazed from PR NewsWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Today at the sold-out Microsoft Management Summit, Corporate Vice President Brad Anderson spoke to nearly 5,000 IT professionals about their opportunity to deliver fast, reliable services with cloud computing. His keynote speech highlighted how customers around the world are already using Microsoft System Center 2012, available today for evaluation and purchase, to create private clouds. Anderson also discussed how IT professionals can evolve their roles with cloud computing to help their businesses be more competitive.

 

"Cloud computing gives IT professionals an opportunity to increase their strategic value to their businesses while building new skills," Anderson said. "Microsoft’s private cloud solutions help IT professionals become cloud innovators for their companies, managing and delivering the applications people need to be productive across private, hybrid and public clouds."…

Grazed from Network Computing.  Author: Gary Hilson.

Enterprises deploying cloud computing infrastructures using OpenStack now have another configuration tool at their disposal thanks to Puppet Labs. The Portland-based company unveiled one of the first OpenStack implementations suitable for enterprise-class production deployments at this week’s OpenStack Summit in San Francisco. The company’s IT automation software is aimed at system administrators, designed to help them launch and support cloud computing infrastructures.

Puppet Labs collaborated with OpenStack community members Cisco, Morphlabs and eNovance to develop OpenStack configuration modules for its products, Puppet open source and Puppet Enterprise, to provide enterprise-ready IT automation for OpenStack’s compute, object storage and image service capabilities. These modules are already available for free download from Puppet Forge, the company’s online marketplace…

Grazed from MarketWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

DataDirect Networks (DDN), world leader in massively scalable storage, today announced the availability of the DDN NAS Scaler 1.1, the latest update to the company’s highly-scalable, feature-rich unstructured data storage platform.

Introduced in April 2011, NAS Scaler enables customers to create a customized blend of capacity, throughput, and IOPS to align with specific applications, a breakthrough that eliminates both system and namespace sprawl and the costly over-provisioning found in other NAS systems. NAS Scaler 1.1 marks the introduction of VMware integration and data deduplication features, along with major enhancements in disaster recovery and multi-protocol file access capabilities to enable enterprise organizations to start small and then scale their Big Data applications with ease…

Grazed from BusinessWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Aspera, Inc., creators of next-generation software technologies that move the world’s data at maximum speed, today announced that its patented faspTM transport technology will be demonstrated as part of numerous partner solutions at NAB 2012. Aspera enables a growing ecosystem of partners in the areas of cloud computing, network-attached storage and digital media production and delivery, where leading technology suppliers bring high-performance transport capabilities to their products, systems and services by building upon the Aspera platform.

A pioneer in the enablement of high-speed data-intensive workflows throughout the enterprise, Aspera has now unlocked the cloud for big data with its industry-leading high-speed transport solutions. Amazon Web Services and Aspera offer combined solutions for high-performance storage, processing and distribution in the cloud, allowing media companies large and small to take full advantage of integrated media workflows at scale on AWS. Microsoft selected Aspera to enable Aspera high-speed transfer with Windows Azure Media Services. Video encoding pioneers, Sorenson Media and Zencoder provide cloud-based services that rely Aspera for big-data movement to and from remote infrastructures in order to offer massively scalable video encoding to their customers. And, online file sharing leader YouSendIt is taking advantage of the Aspera transport platform to deliver enhanced file transfer speeds for large files…